Immanuel Kant - Philosophy Now

hello I'm grant bartley from philosophy Now magazine and you're listening to the philosophy now show on resonance fm this afternoon we'll be talking about the seminal 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant with me to discuss one of history's most profound thinkers I have John Callahan who lectures on cantor King's College London and Andrew Ward who lectures on philosophy at University of York hello Immanuel Kant is not a household name but perhaps he should be his works advocate a change in how we see our relationship to the world as radical as the revolutions of Copernicus Darwin or Freud indeed he calls his ideas a Copernican revolution in philosophy unfortunately his dry technical writing style and his obscuring of his cure arguments within a complex system of ideas responding to quite obscure eighteenth-century philosophical debates with some 18th century assumptions has meant his revolutionary ideas have not become widely known outside of philosophy and sometimes within it this hour I'm hoping that we'll be able to distill into you some of the revolution in thought that can never quite managed to instigate in the world in terms of everyone listening to this can understand and see the significance of but first I wonder if we could set the scene a little John what was the intellectual philosophical millio within which Kant was thinking and working well when he was born in 1724 movement of rationalism was still pretty dominant in Prussia where he lived all his luck and rationalism being what so rationalism would be while starting earlier with Descartes would have been would be the philosophical movement that suggested that all the fundamental philosophical truths could be known just through the power of reason alone right so you wouldn't have to go out into the world and do have any particular experiences or do any particular experiments or make any particular observations to know for example that God existed or that there was an external world or any of these traditional problems but that you could just do it pretty much with the power of your own reason just analyzing certain concepts and understanding the true meaning of those and Kant was reacting it to that well he wasn't he was brought up in that tradition so Kant doesn't write his first really famous work the critique of Pure Reason until he's 57 years old so for most of his life he's working as a rationalist okay and gradually he becomes disillusioned with that movement but he always hangs on to parts of us he always wants to retain a little bit of the power of reason he wants to mix it with other things okay mm I understand like Kant said that he was particularly inspired by the work of David Hume I wonder if you could tell us what was it about what David you said that Kant was reacting to please Andrew yes well he wrote a book did can't called unappealing Lee prolegomena to any future metaphysics may hope to be a science and in that he set out why he came to produces a critical philosophy that's called that's to say his mature philosophy right and he singled out Humes attack on the principle of causation that is to say the principle that every event must have a cause and Hume was critical about our idea right human self was critical about that principle he asked himself how could it be established this issue how could it be established could it be established by experience no says you because in order to establish it every event must have a cause you'd have to look at every event which has happened in the past in the present or in the future that's not possible but every possible event right past nor could you establish that every event must have a cause necessarily has a cause not just that those as you've experienced as a matter of fact have a cause so you can't expect you caught you can't prove it by means of experience now the only other way the human thought it was possible to prove it was by showing that it's true in virtue of the meaning of the terms involved so a rationalist thinking like john was saying well if i said all bachelors are unmarried for instance that would be true in virtue of the meaning of the terms involved and you're quite grant that a lot of the Mehta physicians prior to Kant thought that was by analyzing certain philosophical terms that they could prove propositions like every event must have a cause right but humor pointed out that in fact it was not possible to prove in virtue of the meaning of the terms involved the proposition that every event must have a cause okay so corner Hume you couldn't prove it by means of experience that was the first way you can't prove it in virtue of the meaning of the terms involved as you can prove that every bachelor is unmarried so Hume concluded that it was in fact not a provable proposition that it was just something that we came to believe in as a result of what he said constant conjunction right and this awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers okay John you said yeah it's just I think in that work Kant also says that Humes critique is pretty good but he thinks it almost goes too far because he thinks that you could use that same argument to show that you don't know that seven plus five is equal to twelve you haven't like you don't know that even the protrudes of mathematics are absolutely secure if you don't know the cause is secure so he thinks from reading Hume he realizes something must have gone wrong here this has gone too far throwing mathematics out as well is just as we wish so he wants to find so Kant wants to now find a way that he can prove causality is that all yes certainly but as John just said Kant noted that there are other propositions like seven plus five equals twelve straight line is the shortest distance between two points both mathematical judgments which seem to have the same status as every event cause that is to say they didn't seem to be provable by experience because when we say that 7 plus 5 equals 12 we mean it's always the case that 7 plus 5 must equal 12 you can't prove that by experience but said can't it's also true that it doesn't seem to be provable but by means of analysis of the terms involved okay so it too doesn't appear to be a provable proposition but cantle this was absurd that obviously something had gone wrong with humans analysis if he concluded simply from the fact that something couldn't proved either on the in virtue of experience or in virtue of the meaning of the terms involved that therefore it was not a provable proposition I wasn't propositions we could we could know because we clearly do know that 7 plus 5 equals 12 my okay I think that a cam caught that Hume got certain things right as well as getting things wrong like for example Hume said that his notion of causation that he had when we do make judgments there's no real causation out there in the world but how do we come to make these kinds of judgments that some causes that something has been caused by something else he says well it's a bit of a habit we see things happening together very frequently and then the mind projects the notion of causation with enough associations it starts to see causation there and so on Humes account the mind is contributing a huge amount to how we understand the world that we it's not just about receiving information in but also how we interpret that had the mind interprets that information and I think kantha takes that on into his own project okay so when he's writing his first major work the critique of Pure Reason what was Kant trying to achieve in that book Han drew well I mean there are a number of things that he was trying to achieve briefly and he might be said that he was trying to show whether metaphysics was possible at all metaphysics you mean what good that's a good question there are various sides to metaphysics for count right there are propositions like every event must have a cause which do count for him as metaphysical propositions but there are also others like God exists as soul is immortal and we have free freedom of the world claims that we have freedom of the world that God exists those also are metaphysical claims now he divided metaphysics into those two parts the part like every event must have a which he said underpinned our knowledge of nature and other judgments like God exists claims that God exists not a true claims the soul is immortal which transcend experience no experience could prove that the soul is immortal and neither are they true in virtue of the meaning of the terms involved so that's a synthetic a priori proposition that's to say it's true i if it's true at all not in virtue of the meaning of the terms involved why so it's synthetic but also it can't be proved by means of experience and so it is what he called a prior alright ok I wonder if we could break that down a bit what John what does it cancers in the introduction to his critique that he was trying to find out how synthetic a priori judgement is possible 1 what is he trying to find out when he says that what does these two what do these terms mean if he could expand a bit or not and you say well there are two different distinctions that he's putting together the first there is the distinction between the a priori and the a posterior and by a posterior a we just mean knowledge that's learned or justified by going out into the world and through extensive scientific knowledge very pretty serious not exactly they're just equation observers and with a priori knowledge we're thinking more of the knowledge that we associate with mathematics okay so you need to do any observations to grasp put 7 plus 5 is equal to 12 you can just somehow Noah SHhhh it seems just through the power of reasons so much you know that 7 what 7 means and what plus means and 5 means you can work out that well 12 right that's exactly what Kant was wondering because if it is a priori if you can know it without going into the world does that mean it's also analytic analytic means true just by virtue of the meetings of the con sighs okay so Kant had a radical thought you thought it is a priori it is something that is magnetically writers then they're necessarily true and you can know them without any particular experiences but he thought their sin are not true just by virtue of definition they're true by virtue of us taking concepts together bringing them together and doing something with them and learning in that way so it's a slightly different story than just doing analysis of the meaning of concepts okay so Andrew why was why was this an important project for counting his book to try and prove synthetic April are just well he came to the conclusion that all the central question is odd metaphysics I were well or the judgmental or metaphysics were synthetic a priori propositions the thing that we haven't touched on is the curiosity of such propositions how can we prove them this is in a sense the first and important question that Kant wanted to ask think about it it's synthetic okay so it's not true in virtue or the meaning of the terms involve let's take the proposition every event must have a call right cause we when we start with that that was the one that awoke the proposition that awoke Hume from his daughter historic and from his dogmatic slumbers right it's synthetic that's to say it's not true in virtue of the meaning of the terms involved and yet it carries it is universal every event and it's necessary right how can you possibly prove such a proposition which is both synthetic and a priori and that he said is the question that he's going to be concerned with at least in the first part of the critique of Pure Reason fact he couldn't be considering it all the way through so in a sense his project is to ask himself how are synthetic a priori propositions possible cause all metaphysical claims every event must have a cause for instance and also the soul is immortal right we have free will God exists such claims are also synthetic everywhere how we can proof ok so it's important to note as well that isn't necessarily that optimistic about what you can do in philosophy why he starts off the first edition of the book by saying the human reason has these problems that it has naturally but it can't solve them all so he gives us an new picture of the human being where there are some problems that can be solved and there are others the count and really part of the job of philosophy is to sort out which is which so would it be fair to say that part of his project is to find out the limits of the possibility of knowledge philosophical knowledge and that's exactly right that's what it takes so his his project is a very high-level one he wants to ask how is mathematical knowledge possible what is causation but also he's asking questions about philosophy itself what is philosophical explanation how much can we achieve and what are its limits as you say okay what sort of conclusions did you reach about the limits of what we could know and handle well in the critique of Pure Reason gives us keep that for a moment the created pure reason he thought that he could prove those propositions of metaphysics which underpin our experience of nature for instance our experience of nature is just knowledge of whatever happens in the space and time right he thought that there were certain fundamental propositions which made our experience of nature our experience of objects in space and time possible the easy thought we could prove they are all synthetic a priori propositions but these he thought we could prove like cause a share and like causation every event has a cause substance the substance in the world can neither be created nor destroyed Ryan since these propositions which obviously form an important bedrock for Newtonian physics can indeed be proved but he also thought that there are certain other propositions in the critique of pure reason which cannot be proved I stress proved by theoretical reasoned like God exists the soul is immortal and Free Will exists amongst human beings the easy thought could not be proved or disproved I stress that we can't use our pure theoretical reason to prove that's an important aspect that you can neither prove nor disprove certain things because Kant is working in the Enlightenment come texts he what it's a new age of religious toleration of secularization and there's a lot but there's still an enormous amount of persecution of people for the religious beliefs on the grounds that some people might claim that God is of this certain nature or that there is no God for example Kant wants to take that kind of question out of the debate class to say it's beyond possible proof but it's also beyond possible disprove so you have no grounds and we can't say anything either one way I'll persecute anyone for any of these beliefs they don't know one without the other he says in a famous line at the start he wanted to deny knowledge of certain questions so that he could make room for faith so that he could allow certain people to have their faith-based beliefs outside of being arguments about whether it's rational or not I don't quite agree with John on oh I had so fast critique of Pure Reason is concerned I think I would entirely agree with it but when you come to his ethical writings he wrote a second critique called the critique of practical reason right he does think that you can know certain of these propositions in my view John can come back at me he did think you could prove that we were free you can also have good reason but not absolute proof that God exists and the soul is immortal but I do stress this is not theoretical reason this is practical reason right maybe yeah yeah we will have time to get onto that but I don't know so um can't as I mentioned in the introduction called his philosophy a Copernican revolution in thought what did he mean by that John well he's trying to use the analogy of Copernicus who as we know suggested a switch in the way that we look at things right so we used to presume that the Sun moves around the earth but in fact as we know now it's the earth that's moving around the Sun and so what that happens what happens when you do that is you take some terms like the earth and the Sun and you kind of shift around the way that you're thinking about them you do a switch now Kant thought we needed to do a switch at the very way that we think about doing Philosopher's okay and he said the concepts that we have to switch are the concept of knowledge and the concept of an object so we think that a natural way of what it is to know something is for our mind to match up to how the world is what our representations actually correspond to how objects are so we experience the world and our experience of the world is how the world is that's our natural inclination to think that right exactly and he thinks that is a very natural inclination but in fact it's not the correct way to think about it Hume as we were just talking about what caused a cigar this caused a ssin had shown that we get in lots of information and then we interpret it and it comes out in the different forms we see that there is a causation there can thinks that all experience is somewhat like that like that we get in some unprocessed information but then our mind contributes concepts and start and creates the organized world as we see it so imagine if we use an analogy with psychology we can imagine that our eyes take in lots of data in relation but what happens our brain has to interpret that data and then presents a world in front of us and cancered now we have to think that what it is to be an object you have to look at what it is to know an object just to look at the nature of the minds contribution so what is important is how that how the mind interprets the data of the world is as important as the world itself exactly and in some sense the mind creates the structure of the world okay Andrew I mean could you elaborate on on well I just jobs done a pretty good job I mean this Copernican revolution is in a sense instead it was not called a Copernican revolution by Kant him right okay but it's always referred to as can skip that one a revolution what was revolutionary about well I did John has brought that the point out that I've got a quote here famous quote from can't write hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects that's to say that the objects exists independently of our consciousness and we hope that by using our senses and perhaps some reason we about those object right that's the traditional way but all attempts to attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them independent of experience have on this assumption ended in failure this is a famous quote from him so he says we must make trial of pert turning things round point the John John's making and instead of assuming that objects spatio-temporal objects the objects of nature I exist independently of our consciousness perhaps they are to some extent and he will try to argue this is true that the objects in space and time are in certain fundamental respects dependent on our mind okay but the question is what in what respects are they dependent because clearly if I'm having an experience of seeing John for instance then John must be there for me to see him so the question is in what sense are the objects not independent is John well if you mean that John exists independent of your possible experience against what one normally does think then Kant denies that we anymore my understanding of him that objects only exist as objects of possible experience as to say objects in space and time but I would just like to come back to the scene about synthetic a priori proposition as you asked me about the Copernican revolution and the point about the Copernican revolution is that Kant thought that he could prove these basic propositions of synthetic a priori propositions at least those that underpin nature like every event has a cause and that substance can neither be created nor destroyed if we go through this Copernican revolution and make the world to some extent dependent on our mind rather than hoping that our mind will fit a world exists entirely independently oh and II John use disagreed with some of what Andrew said they're not so much disagree but just can't describes himself as an idealist of a certain kind we mean by idealism we mean we understand that something about the world is dependent on the mind right now you might think that I don't know you might think that the colors of things are really just in our mind and the world as it is in itself isn't really colored so then you'd be an idealist about sorry by the world is in itself you mean the world independent of our perceptions exactly exactly and so then you'd be an idealist about color for example I can't is an idealist about space and time yeah he thinks that the space and time is only in our minds and isn't in the world independently of our minds but there's something he's not an idealist about right and that that there is a world out there that the existence of the world he thinks we don't bring the world into existence by virtue of thinking about it but we bring certain features or characteristics of it into existence but not the very fact that it's there can I just give you about the space and time thing I mean if if the world independent of us doesn't exist in space and time then first of all where does our experience of space and time come from and how can it possibly be true that things are ordered in our experience at all if a space and time don't exist for those things themselves hmm well it's a tricky one yeah right because it's space and time are some of the things that can things we contribute right so we're in our experience of the way so it's our mind we get stimulated somehow by by the world out there and then we project things onto us now some people think we might project our colors onto it other people think we put like you me project causal experience onto us and I can't thinks we project even that things are to the left of and to the right of each other that things are on top of that these kinds of on top of below of these kinds of ways of describing the world are just ways in which our mind interprets the data that comes in so the or any order that is any spatial order for example that's out there is something that we've contributed that's as thought okay um Andrew dthe do you think what do you think the right way of looking at according to candids our relationship of our experience of the world to the world itself ah well well the world as it isn't itself yeah is a world that is not in space and is not in time but we can know nothing about it by using either our senses or our theoretical reason okay what we do know is what exists in space and time because space and time are forms by means of which we experience objects in space and time and as John said conda can't they are contributed space and time by us so we can only know we can only know what we experience of the world we can't know anything about the world beyond our experience of it according to Kant is that fair thing to say well I think that's not not not incorrect yes I think that's okay that's true there are two things that we contribute first of all space and time but we also as John certainly intimating we also contribute the basic concepts or laws by means of which what appears to us in space and time is ordered do you guys also physics exactly the human mind constructs the laws of physics to explain why he constructs I mean it already they are there as basic rules every events have a cause for instance is a rule by which we come to know any change that exists in space according to Kant no event no change that exists in the world can be a causal that to say not have a cause as opposed to Humes position which was it is perfectly conceivable that the world should either have been non causal or should become non causal at any moment where the world means the spatio-temporal will but Kant wants to say that the very possibility of there being spatio-temporal objects depends on two factors space and time which we contribute and certain basic laws and concepts which we bring to the given so that we construct the external world of objects in certain kind of move moissan which they move around we we in fact make that experience only this raises the question to me what does the world itself contribute to this our experience of it I mean not a whole lot we're going to according to count well I like I said one of the few things that it does contribute is the fact that there's something rather than nothing there if for real there's a reason why there is a table here in front of me and the fact that it exists is nothing to do with me right so we are what can't recall finite creatures we don't we can't just bring things into existence just by thinking of them I think of Paris now that doesn't bring Paris into the way in any kind of way and similarly I can't I can't wish away this table if just because I wanted to be there these things aren't up to us in certain kinds of ways so that everything about our experience that isn't up to us is contributed by this contribute contributed by those things outside the minder I heard from them sure but what is that what and is it do we know anything about that according to Kent very little he says he describes us as the realm of things as they are in themselves this is way of talking about it or sometimes he uses a different word pneuma 'no and he says that our knowledge of that realm of that kind of level is very very thin indeed but it should be noted that Kent would say like contemporary the world that we can know goes quite deep it goes down to the levels of quarks and neutrons and whatever else all our most deepest science is still knowledge of the world as it appears as we can perceive it so when he's talking about things as they're on themselves he means some really deep down level that only may be a being of a super intelligence could ever access the world that we experience right is the world in space and time rather the use right we come to know by means of our senses and past by our understanding as well is the world in space and time that is the world of appearances right okay and he contrasts that with the world as it is in itself right that's to say the world that is not in space and not in taha yeah but is the ground or cause of the given that that appears to us in space and time and which our minds then collect together under certain rules this is obviously a much more difficult part of his philosophy but I think it is important that when we were saying beforehand that the mind contributes the human mind contributes the space a space and time and the laws it doesn't contribute everything the world of things in themselves or what he also calls the numeral world give us the manifold right what means what sorry well the manifold is just the data the series that the data that appears our experience is timing not quite as our experience is a product of the given data the manifold which is arises is grounded in causes depending on which way of looking at it you want to use people differ about this the the numeral world the things in themselves ground the manifold that appears in space and time but it doesn't become they don't become objects in space and time until the mind has also employed these concepts or laws that is there's in the mind to produce a fully determined spatio-temporal world the Newtonian world of objects that are rigorously determined and master is neither created nor destroyed in this circle or what kind of stuff make sure that I've got my understanding about this right you say that there's something to Kant in the world is it is independent of us which creates this set of data which our minds then convert into our experience of objects on property called the phenomenal world so the numeral world is the world as it is in itself and then we convert the data of this world in itself but then surely he's he's got to be saying that there is something about the new mineral world that we know which is the data that is the basis for our experience of it now is that not of it is something substantial to know about the world well he it can seem that way one of the most tricky things to understand about counters why he thought that it seems plausible that my mind does a lot of interpreting of the information that comes in right that we construct it me make sense of it and we constructor with certain concept right like space and time place but but but why does he think that if the mind contributes contributes a concept then that means it's not there in the thing and these NASA compression which is your own question one of the well he has it's he has complicated reasons for why he thinks that's the case but he does think that there are he thinks that all the kind of conceptual vocabulary that we have all the concepts that we use are just exclusively coming from the mind and the only job of things in themselves is really just to trigger our minds into action it just stimulates our mind somehow to start doing this interpreting work so one of the things that we have to understand as Kant is imagining that when we go and look at the world we think we can make sense of it we see objects we see substances we see things engaged in causal connections like when apples fall off trees and we think that the world is like that anyway right but Kant is saying by the time we come along to that and see these kinds of experiences our minds already done an awful lot of work offstage as it were so that we can see the world as that so by that the first time that we're experiencing things we're already using these concepts and bringing to bring those kind of experiences into being and making them coherent okay Andrew how does he how does he justify this perspective on reality if we can put it like that I mean why does he think this is true well this comes back to the Copernican Revolution that he thinks that if we think of the world in itself and the world of appearances as to in some way to sting some ways distinct then we can explain those propositions which he has no doubt are true like seven plus five equals twelve so he's starting with an idea and he's trying to work his way into explaining his position we can justify a judgments synthetic a priori judgments which we began with which are we think are true but we can't see how to prove them but if we have divided the world into two to divide the world see divide everything into the world of appearances and things in themselves and confine ourselves to the world of appearances that we can prove the seven plus five equals twelve we can prove that every event has a cause because actual fact these kind of propositions make our experience for spatio-temporal objects possible at all whilst if we didn't have this distinction between appearances and things in themselves it would be a complete puzzle how we've come to have any knowledge of the world at all so that's his justification or one of his justifications he has psoriasis but that's one of his justifications for making the distinction between appearances and things in themselves it's hard to get our heads around the prayer counters coming from one of the ways if there's an option between either you know the simple truths of mathematics that one plus one is equal to two or and if that's the case then you can't in that there is a deep down mysterious world called the world of things in themselves that aren't in space and aren't in time and we can't know anything about them but when they must be there he thinks it's one or the other you can't have both you've got either have mathematics and you accept that there's a world of things in themselves or you you don't think there's a world of things in themselves but then he thinks you can't have mathematics and he's not willing to give up mathematics he's still in that scientific rationalist tradition that he thinks we do know these things right he thinks the only way we can explain Alessandra was saying how we can justify how we know these things is if it's a story really about how I'm if they're truth about how our minds interpret the world and how our minds bring the world into being certain counselor can I pick up on that because my question then would be why is it the case that we can only know things if things are the way that can set them out here Andrew well we could only know things which are carry necessity and universality which we will again occur like like seven plus five equals twelve like every event has a cause he's a synthetic a priori proposition we could only know these things yeah if we divide the world into sorry have divided our knowledge into a pit in two appearances we do know and in two things in themselves which are the ground or cause of the data out of which we construct the appearances about which we can know virtually nothing yes but why that's the question why why why can we only know them if we do this well well because as I said right at the beginning they carry both necessity and universality with them you can't prove them by experience oh okay okay and you can't prove them in virtue of the meaning of the terms involved and can't revolutionary ways to say you can prove them by showing that they make our experience of objects in space and time possible but only if space and time belong to the mind or not independently of it okay why is this a revolution in thinking John well can't shifted the attention of what word to not just a what we might call ground level philosophical questions like what is causation or what is substance and yeah what is the soul but also to a higher level question about what are we doing when we're doing philosophy how is it that we can even hope to do any full fyodor thought Oh any thought at all already possibly yes I think that's right and so he started to do this examination of like what is the philosopher what perspective is he or she occupying when they try to do philosophy yeah and it became a very influential question about just what are the proper conditions if you will for doing philosophy and afterwards people started investigating lots of different types of conditions the starting points from when you might be doing philosophy if you don't like it the German ID lists if you think about for example Nietzsche and someone like that they all start to examine the different conditions under which someone starts to do philosophy and I think that started with Kant where he started to ask ourselves what are we doing we're doing sets off so the the question now becomes what are the conditions under which we can know or think anything rather than assuming that we got rational thought and it's as simple as that yes I think can't start off from the assumption that we do know things he's not like Descartes I doesn't think that let's try and cast everything into doubt and and then sit and then build our way back up but rather he says let's start with the things that we obviously do know and examine what's needed to make that knowledge possible so he starts with mathematics and he says what okay that we know that seven plus five is equal to twelve but what is it that we're knowing and we're knowing things like that right and he says really what we're knowing is things our own minds are contributing he thinks that really mathematics is a story about how we organize things in space and time seven plus five equals to twelve really just means if you have seven dots and five dots then you had to have twelve dots or seven strokes and five strokes and you put them together and you've got twelve strokes but they're really truths about things that you can experience in space and time well so he tells you a story about what mathematics is that is very mind dependent and then he says well okay that's what knowledge of the world is it's knowledge of these kind of rep patience that we contribute and then start and build up from there and see what else do we contribute and making sense of the world fine thank you I wonder if you could just briefly go into the idea of free will I mean this distinction between the world of appearances in the world is it and it is in itself has important implications for what Kant says about human freedom I wonder if you could elaborate on what they are and why he why this is so Andrew yes well um so far we've been looking at a certain sense of what he thinks we can write particularly those propositions that care that carry universality always and necessity like ever events have a cause or 7 plus 5 equals valve but there are other propositions which he thinks that we cannot know by means of theoretical reason like for instance that human beings have free will we can't know whether they do or whether they do it because they thought you meant so equal argument X I mean this is actually important because he has a second reason you asked me earlier why he divided the world into the world of things from ourselves and a fair-sized cities we had a number of reasons we looked at one but there's a second that that he thinks that a number of these metaphysical propositions like we have free will that the soul is immortal etc and so a quite a lot of other ones that in fact there can be arguments on both sides which are equally good if you don't accept his his Copernican revolution as to say don't distinguish between the world of appearances and things in themselves if you think that we're aware of things as they are in themselves and not merely appearances then you're going to get involved in contradictions and in fact you're not in fact I could have a consistent view of the world at all anyway so far as these important metaphysical questions are concerned if on the other hand you embrace the comparison revolution and acknowledge that the world of things in themselves is a world about which we can know virtually nothing other than it exists by means of theoretical reason then indeed these contradictions can be shown to disappear like I've shown to disappear and the second reason why he thinks the Copernican revolution can be proved okay tragedies calmed so John why according to camp must free will be outside of the phenomenal world or physical causality or well as Andrew was saying he wants in some sense the did the division between the world as it appears in world as it is in itself gives Cantor's space where he can put certain problems that are in Kate that he are incapable of being answered he thinks that the and free will is one of them he thinks that the phenomenal world the world as it appears is completely causal everything that happened what happens in accordance with some calls and that cause is he would say a physical cause lie so he completely agrees that if you look in the world as it appears to explain why I do the actions that I do you can engage in psychology and neuroscience and you can find physical explanations for why I did what I did but that isn't the full story he thinks there's we we don't take think ourselves to be completely determined well some of us don't take us to be completely determined by physical causes we think that we freely choose to do things okay and cancer dwell white but we don't find any little flash of freedom when we look at our MRI scanner I do the neuroscience we don't see any power of free will there so then we must conclude there is no free will it's impossible right if workout she or I you can't experience it but what if there's a different world right what if there's a different domain where something like free will might exist that's beyond the thing I could experience now that would help a little bit with the thought that we don't see free will but might still have it but it's a very mysterious notion it's free will is existing in an entirely different domain from the one that we can experience yet somehow manifests in this one when I choose to raise my hand isn't that contradicting his a is assertion that we can't know anything about the world disease in yourself if free will it operates in the world disease in his I think he's on delicate ground here let's provide okay he would claim though that I never he would say I've never claimed that I know that Free Will exists I just can think that it's possible that there is a different domain out there and one of the things that could be out there is free will just like I can think that there could be a god that exists out there right as well okay Andrew what does Kent mean when he says that he's a transcendental idealist in an empirical realist well I he's a transcendental idealist because he thinks that the world in space and time does not exist independently of human or our cognition does not exist okay so that's the idealist is somebody who believes that the world exists in the mind right well a doesn't exist independently of the human mind such okay something special about because from the from the perspective of the way things are in themselves that the world in space and time is merely ideal it doesn't actually exist in its own and own right but so far in itself independently of human consciousness I mean I I think it is important there we go back to this thing about freewill because it does tie up with the importance that he gives to freewill I mean John is completely right that he doesn't think that you can prove in the critique of pure reason that freedom of the will exists indeed as John mentioned and it's a tricky questions which I'm certainly not going to give an answer now how can freewill even manifest itself in the world if everything in the world is causally determined and in order to be free you should not be constantly determined this is a famous problem right it is absolutely central to his Copernican revolution freedom of the will because according to him you need freedom of the will in the sense in which he believes this freedom of the way in which he thinks that that that the freedom of the will could exist a there is going to be such a thing as moral action right so that you need freedom to be model you need freedom to be more and according to him you need free the sort of freedom that he thinks is possible in the world of things in themselves and it's only when he comes to his moral philosophy that he actually thinks that you can prove that we are free but that is a practical proof our realization that Duty is something that we have to obey what we ought to obey that Duty is something that we ought to do proves that we are free is a famous phrase ought implies can you can't accept that you ought to do something right unless you can do it right okay and so since we do accept that we ought to do our duty it follows that we must accept from a practical point of view that we are free unfortunately we don't really have time to go into the ethics in a big way I wondered just can you say John what does can't conclude about how what we've been talking about synthetic a priori judgments these judgments about things like to pistou his form and philosophical truths how does he conclude they are possible to make so in the end they're possible because there's a certain conception of truth no that we have like that isn't any longer about when our representations match on to the deepest way the universe's as they are in themselves like rather something can be true so long as it's coherent and structured and obeys the concepts that we bring to the table right so he there's a certain redefinition of even what it is to have objective true claims about the world and that's going back to earlier question the way in which he thinks you can still be an empirical realist I might think to be an empirical real I saw what does that mean you have to so he he said strangely that he's a transcendental idealist but he's also an empiric which me it looks as if these are two different positions but he says transcendental idealism Andrew just explained but empirical realism Heath claims is just the idea that you can know a world of objects that engage in obey laws and causal connections he says my theory gives you all that it gives you all the realism that you need but you kind of define now knowing the real world in a new way in terms of the ways in which human beings can possibly interpret the world and so he is quite revolutionary and he decides that our theories about what objectivity and truth themselves are have to be decided and argued for relative to what human beings can do okay thank you just as we were wrapping up now I wonder Andrew what do you think Kant got right and what do you think he got wrong hahahaha well that's a that's a that's a bit of a difficult question I think that he got right that the ways in which meta physicians were attempting to answer their questions like was not likely to lead to any correct answers but whether he was right to make the claims that he did make that space and time are simply contributed by us and don't exist in themselves whether he was right that the mind has certain basic concepts and laws without which we couldn't experience objects in space and time at all these absolutely basic thoughts of Kant important although if they're true are are indeed revolutionary I think dudn't we do need to ask ourselves very carefully whether they are in fact correct ok said John what what do you still find compelling about Kent's philosophy well I think there's some sense in which his story about how the mind contributes the structure to the way that we perceive seems very plausible right but those questions are now getting investigated by psychologists rather than philosopher I so a lot of in terms of perhaps it's a bit strange but the thing that I find most compelling about counts way of looking at the world is related to the first thing he said that the mind has lots of questions that it is burdened with it has to ask these questions but they can't answer them and even once you've discovered that you can't answer these questions those problems are still there they're still troubling young right but now you know that you've got to find something other than philosophy in order to talk about them maybe it's about religion maybe it's about moral practice and just engaging with each other in the world but what he does is actually draw an idea that philosophy itself is a certain limited practice it can get us a lot but it is itself as a limit okay fantastic added on that note wheeler we'll call it a day next week we'll be talking about meta ethics so you can tune in and find out what that is uh I've been grant but you've been listening to the philosophy now radio show if if you like philosophy read philosophy now and look up my books on the web please and thank you francesco our engineer here and goodbye

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 34,011

Rating: 4.8589211 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Kant, Immanuel Kant, Transcendental Idealism, Metaphysics, Philosophical Realism, Synthetic A Priori, German Idealism, Idealism, Subject-Object, Appearance and Reality, Critique of Pure Reason, Rationalism, Empiricism, Critical Philosophy, Kantian, Noumenon, Noumenal, Things-In-Themselves

Id: leMf3mQtRvo

Length: 51min 35sec (3095 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2016